Family Tree Post 74 (7 Aug 2023)
The Lewteys were from Yorkshire. Three separate DNA relationships lead eventually to Ripley, nr Harrogate.
Family Tree Post #75 (1 Oct 2023)
By request, a bit more information on the workings behind post #74, where I was able to assert that my grandmother, born in Burma, was descended from Yorkshire stock.
Apparently, we each have over a million 9th cousins (common 8th grandparents), and the chance of proving a DNA link with any one of these is about 1 in 1000 where both cousins have taken a test.
Likewise, documentation gets thinner the further back we look. People make assumptions that surviving records are all there ever were, and make unlikely links around these islands. Before long, every American is descended from the 7th Baron of Chipping Sodbury, with a coat of arms proudly emblazoned upon their family tree.
So neither DNA nor documentation can be consistently relied upon beyond my 64 4th gt-grandparents, which helped me size my 2020 lockdown project.
However, in subsequent careful searching of my 18,000 DNA matches, I’ve found patterns of locations of surnames, which have made it worthwhile tracing multiple relatives back to a common ancestor, and identifying the relatives 8th-12th cousins with reasonable confidence.
One of these families was Lewtey, as in post #74. Yesterday, having Rose ancestors in C16 “Hales Owen” moved from being a possibility to a near certainty. And in recent months, it has given new insights into New World emigration, of which more anon…